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About Bonnie

In 1998 I was inspired to start a Year To Live group after reading Stephen Levine’s book by the same name. I knew I would be more committed to living with death as a guide in a group setting. The process was very powerful for me and for the other people in the group. I was asked to write an article about the Year To Live experience for my local newspaper, the Marin Independent Journal. I received hundreds of phone calls just after returning from India, the place I wanted to visit before I die. I started to lead groups for my livelihood at this time.

I grew up in a family that never talked about death even though my father was missing in action in the Korean War. His oil painting hung in our living room and his eyes seemed to follow us wherever we went. I waited for him all the years of my childhood. When I went to my first POW/MIA meeting in early 1998, forty- five years after my father disappeared, I learned he had died on the day his plane was shot down in 1952. This was the month before I began the Year To Live process.

I had ended a 16 year career providing patient care, departmental management, and educational services to hospital staff and patients. During those years I was with many people as they died. I had also been my good friend’s legal representative for health care matters. She died of complications from a heart/lung transplant. I made the decision to discontinue her life support based on her expressed wishes and was with her when she died. Her dying and death was very different than so many I had witnessed as a Respiratory Therapist. My friend's death was held in love and compassion. From that time I knew I wanted to continue to bring awareness to the dying process and to the mystery of death.

In 1996 I participated in a professional training for health care practitioners with Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. This training added depth to my teaching and practice of Mindfulness meditation. I began teaching women in jail and prison at this time and continue now.

I have led 40 plus year-long groups through the Year To Live process. It continues to be deeply moving to witness people waking up in life by living mindfully with death as a guide. The work has expanded and I now teach daylong and multiple day workshop/retreats called Changing Perspectives: Living & Dying Mindfully based on my experience leading groups and the practices I have developed. These workshop/retreats are offered at meditation centers and a variety of venues nationally. The workshops are available for CEUs for MFTs and LCSWs in California. The next retreat and training will be April 20th - 26th, time and place to be determined.

I also teach meditation at the Wednesday Night Vipassana Meditation Community in Berkeley, California, and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of San Francisco. I bring passion and joy to my work. I am currently writing a book that explores my relationship to death as a guide in living life and have been published in newspapers and The Inquiring Mind.

I am deeply grateful to Stephen Levine and the practice of living life fully with death as a guide, without ever calling death to me. The daily practice of gratitude inspires me to remember the gifts of my work and my life.

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About the Logo

The Living Mindfully Now logo is taken from the book "Zen Painting" by Yasuichi Awakawa - It was painted by Gibon Sengai (1750-1837), a Zen priest. The painting resides in the Idemitsu Art Museum in Tokyo.

"Like everything else, these geometrical shapes belong essentially to the void. Yet it is the nature of this world that there should be disparity and intercourse between apparently dissimilar things. The apparently irreconcilable circle, triangle and square are, in fact, an accurate representation of the world of appearances, of the world of manifestation." - Yasuichi Awakawa

I chose this image to represent my work in what appears to be the disparity of living, dying and death because their relationship is also an intercourse. The circle represents the void and is drawn in one continuous line, the triangle represents impermanence or change, and the square represents the form of our life. When we live our lives with death as a guide, without calling death to us, we recognize the gift of being alive right now, and enter into the ever-changing dance of now.

 

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